She stepped out into Main Avenue without looking, drawing an angry honk from a motorist. Two grinning young men ran past her, one waving the newspaper, the other shouting, “Down with the kaiser!” Their footfalls splashed mud on her skirt.

A knock at the parlor door interrupted the driving beat, the movement of Wilma’s hands. When she lifted her fingers from the keys, the sudden silence pounded in her ears. “Yes?” she said.

The new maid slid the pocket door open just wide enough to put her head in. “Dinner is ready, ma’am,” she said, her accent thickly Norwegian.

“Is my husband home?” Wilma asked.

“Yes, and the boys, too, ma’am.”

Wilma thought there was something odd about the girl’s tone, and she looked to see that the maid was blushing. She was a young girl, perhaps twenty, and too pretty, with curly golden hair and bright eyes.

Wilma wished for the thousandth time that Terese had not become too elderly to work. She was tired of these silly young maids, who came off the impoverished farms where they’d grown up, and all too easily got fancy ideas about their wealthy employer’s sons. “You’re discharged,” she told the girl, hands still poised above the keyboard. “You may come to collect your pay in the morning.”

“Mrs.—?”

“You heard me. We won’t be needing you any longer.”

The girl stifled a sob, and slid the door shut, leaving Wilma alone again.

She was glad she hadn’t troubled to learn the girl’s name. She took a deep breath and shook her head, trying to clear it. She wanted to prepare herself to argue rationally with the boys. Surely there was some way to convince them not to go.

She had to, because she had given her life for them already. Every time she’d looked out the parlor window and dreamed that her piano was on a stage and thought of the money her father had left her when he died—money she had managed to keep a secret from John by leaving it with her father’s advisers—and thought of walking out of this house and not looking back, she had stopped herself. She loved her children, and her dreams were withered like old fruit, anyway. It was only the piano that made her think such scandalous things. She would force herself to get up then, to attend to the children, the drudgery of running the house, overseeing the evening’s meal.